IDEAS

IDEAS; Feel Like Screaming? Excellent! You're in Demand

Published: November 1, 1997

(Page 2 of 2)

Those who watch shows on aliens, she suggests, are more likely to think their own sexual fantasies are memories of encounters with aliens. And those who fought in the Persian Gulf war and hear about their exposure to nerve gas in Iraq will attribute their memory losses and digestive problems to that, even if there is no conclusive evidence. (The medical community as well as the Federal Government are still split on the matter. A major Congressional investigation concluded this week that a ''variety of toxic agents'' were probably responsible for veterans' health problems. But the Pentagon says there is no causal link.)

Ms. Showalter suggests that today's hysterics are influenced by popular culture the way 19th-century hysterics were influenced by Charcot. According to Sander Gilman, Charcot was a virtual impressario of hysterics. During his weekly lectures, Charcot would put them on display, drawing huge crowds and turning the hysterics into the 19th century's version of media stars. His colleague Paul Richer sketched hysterical patients in various poses. Blanche Wittman, Charcot's most famous hysteric, who became a Surrealist saint, learned how to writhe and swoon by looking at pictures, Mr. Gilman suggests.

With historical examples like these, it is not surprising that Ms. Showalter's hysterics are not happy with her diagnosis. If hysteria is a language or performance, doesn't that make hysterics fakers, slackers and wimps? Ms. Showalter says no. ''I don't regard hysteria as weakness, badness, feminine deceitfulness, or irresponsibility,'' she writes. Hysteria is ''a form of expression, a body language for people who otherwise might not be able to speak or even to admit what they feel.''

Some of them can speak well enough to say she is full of bunk. Chronic fatigue sufferers, for example, have sent her hate mail and have a Web site devoted to fighting her. One woman offered her ''a pint of my A-negative blood anytime she wants to demonstrate to herself her conviction that my disease is fin de siecle angst.'' No infectious agent has yet been found to cause chronic fatigue, and the medical community is divided on whether one exists. But chronic fatigue sufferers continue to search for one.

Alas, even the desire to be vindicated in sickness can be viewed as a mark of hysteria. In the 19th century, when Charlotte Perkins Gilman famously chronicled her own descent into hysteria in ''The Yellow Wallpaper,'' this is what she wrote about her husband: ''John is a physician, and perhaps . . . perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick!''

This is the paradoxical nature of hysteria. ''It is a modish diagnosis for historians,'' Mr. Shorter says, but ''patients do not want to be diagnosed as hysterical.'' They know that in this society ''an organic diagnosis has a legitimacy that a psychological diagnosis does not.'' And all the literary critics and social historians in the world aren't going to convince them otherwise.